While getting ready in the morning I like to listen to the radio, as many people do. Being 22, the radio is usually tuned into Radio One to listen to Chris Moyles’s breakfast show, which is a good way to start the day if, as like me, you are not exactly a morning person and can’t deal with hard hitting news as soon as you open your eyes, and need some comedy to ease you into the day.

Once I’ve started in a good mood after having a laugh or two with the team’s banter, I can face heavy news stories and debate. But today, my ears pricked up at a conversation Chris Moyles was having on his show and it got the wheels in my brain turning slightly faster than usual as I found it really thought provoking.

He was discussing a false story that had appeared in the Sun over the weekend about him being taken off of Radio One by the end of the year. The general line of the conversation/rant was that the Sun was allegedly been told by the BBC press office that the story was untrue, yet they decided to run it anyway on the front page of Saturday’s newspaper. They also had not made any effort to seek a comment from Chris Moyles or his publicist about the story.

Perhaps it was just my chosen line of profession that I found this such an interesting piece of radio, but it did get me thinking. The way the Sun allegedly wrote the article was completely against everything we have been taught in the last year on my journalism course in Cardiff. We have it ingrained into us that we cannot run a story, even if there is just the slightest amount of doubt that it may be true, let alone if we knew we were making completely false claims. We are also told to at least make attempts to get each side of the story so it is balanced. In the Sun’s defence, they did contact the BBC, but that’s where the main problem lies, because they were told by the BBC that Chris Moyles was not being fired and the story was based on false rumours. Yet the Sun still ran it.

Running a false story is one of the biggest mistakes to make as a journalist. Not only is it not responsible journalism, something which tries to keep the industry above a certain level of standards, but it ruins your reputation as a reliable journalist. It also ruins the reputation of the newspaper you are writing for and affects the whole profession in general as it makes a mockery of journalism as a career as well as good pieces of journalism which are still seen in the profession. It also adds to the erosion of public trust, something which is already depressingly low. Currently journalists are less trusted than politicians or estate agents a poll of public trust in professions revealed.

It doesn’t matter if you think the story will sell copies of the newspaper. A responsible journalist needs to think about their actions, and if they are even the slightest bit doubtful about the facts of the story, they should be checked up on, not included in the story, or if the whole story is a farce then it should be scrapped all together.  Because if a story is untrue, the journalist is not only being dishonest to themselves but they are also lying to their readers.